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The Linux Kernel SABOTEURS.

Although the Linux kernel saboteurs (a number of so called Linux kernel "developers") have sabotaged many areas of Linux, I will concentrate on their efforts in sabotaging Reiser4.

As some will have noticed, Reiser4 no longer works as it used to. The recent patches of Andrew Morton, and Riffard Laurent, cause corruption problems (when they work at all). Morton's patches, also reduced Reiser4's functionality, removing, for example, the cryptocompress plugin. Riffard's patches include the cryptocompress plugin, which seems to work, but the patch causes corruption for plain Reiser4.

You see, the Reiser4 saboteurs arranged that plain Reiser4 will not work properly. However, they forgot to sabotage the more complex case of transparent compression, so we have the weird situation where the more complex case works fine, while the kernel "developers" "struggle" to get the simple case to work like it used to.

The parts of Reiser4 they have not touched, still work, but where they have coded, Reiser4 no longer works.

The fact that Reiser4 worked well, before Hans Reiser's arrest and imprisonment (on what appears to be trumped-up charges) and now doesn't, means that it should be easy to spot the sabotage.

After digging around in the source code, the evidence of deliberate sabotage is very clear.

I present some of the evidence (found by comparing Riffard's patch with older Namesys patches) below.

Update: Namesys has released 2.6.20 and 2.6.21 kernel patches. This has enabled one to completely isolate the differences between Namesys' 2.6.20 patch and Riffard's. The diff file is very small and can be found here. The early sabotage is concentrated in this small file.

This change is hard to spot with SetPageWriteback and set_page_writeback, being very similar in name. This change is almost guaranteed to cause problems, as set_page_writeback is called without calling end_page_writeback(). According to Documentation/filesystems/Locking, this will leave the page itself marked clean but it will be tagged as dirty in the radix tree. This incoherency can lead to all sorts of hard-to-debug problems in the filesystem like having dirty inodes at umount and losing written data. Just as the saboteurs desire, and what we see happening.

The definition of SetPageWriteback is found in linux-2.6.20/include/linux/page-flags.h,

From the above definitions, it is clear that swapping set_page_writeback for SetPageWriteback was not an accidental mistake (the code is completely different).

The patch, move-page-writeback-acounting-out-of-macros.patch, is Andrew Morton's attempt to completely cover his tracks. He claims it is "inconsistent" and "awkward" to have the three page-writeback accounting macros in include/linux/page-flags.h (together with all the other page macros) and that it would be better somehow, if they were moved to mm/page-writeback.c. However, not a single one of these definitions is actually transfered to mm/page-writeback.c. Two of them have their definition split between the two named files and the third, SetPageWriteback, is "accidentally" lost. It just disappears.

In this way, Andrew Morton completely eliminates all reference to SetPageWriteback in the (2.6.21) mm-kernel.

Comment

Thanks for the links, you should probably also put a link to the original this is based on (the Wired Blog).

Remember that in the country this takes place (the murder trial), it doesn't matter what you think. It doesn't even matter what the jury itself thinks of the person's character or "acting strangely" (atleast it's not supposed to) - what matters is what you can prove.

Guilt must be proven, a person is innocent until proven guilty in the USA. There has been a lot of conjecture and circumstantial evidence, which does not mean proof at all.

As to the "kernel saboteurs", uhhmmmm. I have been a user of reiserfs3 for years and never noticed all these "issues" that people all of a sudden came up with (after Reiser was arrested). In fact I never was affected by any sort of corruption or whatnot - in 6+ years of using the filesystem (since 2.4.0)!

ResierFS v4 is something I've wanted to try for a while, but it seems as if everytime I've gone to just do it that I've been "blocked" by one thing or another (boot CD lacks support, kernel patch is broken, developer kernel has bugs, etc.).

The problem was not that I couldn't just use a NameSys patch on my own kernel (I used my own kernel anyway), and do a double install to get the main install up on v4, the issue was that the last time I looked the last patch I could find to be easily hacked to use a recent kernel (one I wanted) did not support compression. That is the sole reason for me wanting to migrate from v3 to v4, is the realtime compression (not for space increase, but for performance increase).

What I can say from my experience personally is this:

there were several reiserfs v4 patches in a certain kernel developer's tree that were not immediately apparant to be broken... but they were/are. An unnecessary kludge was introduced for no reason what-so-ever, which was the cause of the corruption. This developer is a very "big-name" person, and I will not tell you of whom I speak (this is not about flames, and I don't know why he did it i.e. a mistake or misunderstanding or what). Needless to say however, a lot of people use his patches for bleeding-edge features, mainly because he is supposed to be "dependable" and "official". So of course, eventually it was noticed - this few lines of code that was unecessarily introduced causing the coruption, and when asked he gave the most unbelievable answer. Then he proceeded to do a rewrite and what appeared as "cover his tracks".

Anyhow that is what happened. Make of it what you will, but it surely was NOT bitrot or anything so simple...

If you want to look at conspiracy theories, look at who the biggest sponsor was originally. There's your answer right there, and probably what they'd do to "get rid" of the filesystem (have the inventor locked away)

BTW I've never understood the obsession about ext2 and ext3. ext2 was the worst filesystem I've used since the old days of UFS, and the only filesystems I've personally had explode were both ext2/ext3.

I think I'll go install onto v4 now and do whatever necessary to get it done (if that means reintegrating compression back into the latest version then so be it). I want to do some benchmarks and stress-testing